Can I use Unicode in my Perl sources?

Yes, you can! If your sources are
UTF-8 encoded, you can indicate that
with the use utf8 pragma.

use utf8;

This doesn’t do anything to your
input, or to your output. It only
influences the way your sources are
read. You can use Unicode in string
literals, in identifiers (but they
still have to be “word characters”
according to w ), and even in custom
delimiters.

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Answer

You saved your program in UTF-8, but forget to tell Perl. Add use utf8;.

Also, you are programming much too complicated. The JSON functions DWYM. To inspect stuff, use Devel::Peek.